Science influenced by science fiction

*There’s not a lot of science fiction around these days, so pretty soon science will have to put up with being influenced by paranormal romance.

*I never minded that working scientists were influenced by science fiction, but I was always impressed by what bad science fiction scientists liked. It was usually junk that they had read back when they were 14, before they had to knuckle down and earn a doctorate.

An entire cottage industry now exists to facilitate this process of extracting certain technical resources from science fiction (and often fantasy and horror fiction, as well): the subgenre of popular science writing whose formula is “The Science of [X Media Franchise].” For example, The Science of Anime: Mecha‐Noids and AI‐Super‐Bots (2005), by Lois H. Gresh and Robert E. Weinberg, assesses science fiction concepts from a variety of anime series that might be viable in the “real world,” explaining what further developments would be needed to turn them into science (thus complementing those modding processes that take place, for example, in the labs of Mechanized Propulsion Systems). Written by sundry professional scientists and science popularizers, books such as Anne Simon’s The Real Science Behind the X‐Files: Microbes, Meteorites, and Mutants (1999), Roger Highfield’s The Science of Harry Potter (2002), and Jeanne Cavelos’s The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist’s Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books (1999) remix popular culture with elite science.

While initiating the labor of blueprint mods, these books often attend to elements of science fiction that, in their native (i.e., diegetic) form, cannot be directly adapted to technical purposes. Cavelos writes that, over the course of her scientific training, “I was already fascinated by the idea of space travel, and Star Wars fueled my interest in space exploration and the possibility of alien life. As I went through college studying astrophysics, though, I was taught again and again the scientific truths that made Star Wars impossible.”18 Such elements of “impossibility,” in order to enter into the discourse and practice of professional science at all, must therefore be modified to a more extreme degree. And this type of modification we might then consider under the category of supplementary mods.

The supplementary mod appears in the laboratory as an approximation or compensation, a scientifically viable alternative to some otherwise appealing, but technically impossible, science fiction conceit. A typical example of the supplementary mod can be found in the research of David R. Smith and his colleagues on transformation optics and the electromagnetic cloaking of matter at microwave frequencies—in other words, the science of “invisibility shields” and “cloaking devices.” Smith has described his research on transformation optics as a workaround method to the fictional invisibility technologies seen in Fantastic Four comic books, the Star Trek series, and even the Harry Potter books (((told ya))):
There is undeniably a link between science fact and the ideas that emerge in science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction authors are inspired by actual scientific and technological discoveries, but allow themselves the freedom to project the possible future course of these discoveries and their potential impact on society, perhaps remaining only weakly tethered to the facts. … Scientists, in turn, often derive inspiration from the imaginative possibilities that exist in fictional worlds, but are constrained to follow the laws of nature that apply in this world. The inventions in fictional worlds seldom transition to the real world—at least not in the way they are first imagined.19

So the cloaking devices employed by Romulans in Star Trek may not be directly adaptable to science, at least “not in the way they are first imagined” by the television shows (“One shouldn’t pay very much to obtain the secrets of Romulan cloaking technology,” Smith cautions). But Smith’s research now becomes a scientifically acceptable supplement. Enabling the science symbolically to attach itself to the grand future imagined by the Star Trek saga and similar narratives, the supplementary modification lends itself to new blueprints for future science and future fiction: “We have now succeeded in taking the prospect of invisibility from the realm of science fiction and fantasy to reality, providing what amounts to a blueprint for a cloaking device. … So, while we [researchers] have been inspired by the invisibility of fictional worlds, perhaps the discoveries that might follow from transformation optics will in turn have an impact in fictional worlds—as well as in the actual world.”20

Finally, the speculative mod. This modified form of science fiction appears frequently in scientific writing as a way of discussing possible futures and extrapolations of current research. As historians and cultural theorists of science, we are becoming increasingly attentive to the powerful role that scientific speculation, technological forecasting, and promissory futures play in the development of science and to how futurological narratives and road maps function as scripts in the everyday routine of laboratory protocols.21

But we have yet fully to take on the manifold ways these practices interrelate with the predominant mode of speculative narration in the modern era—namely, science fiction. Its generic traces can often be discerned where scientific probabilities or expectations for the future are rendered as discourse, as a now quotidian way of speaking about the consequences of scientific or technological change: the everydayness in postindustrial societies of what Brooks Landon has called “science fiction thinking” and Istvan Csicsery‐Ronay, Jr., has called “science fictionality.”22

We could point to a number of famous speculative mods, such as J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus (1924) or Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near (2005).23 But for the sciences at large, speculative mods appear most commonly in the concluding sections of research articles or funding proposals, which often venture into social potentials, payoffs, and other visions. Particularly in cases where the future of the world is imagined to hinge on the evolution of the research (such as we have seen, historically, in the fields of spaceflight, nuclear physics, cybernetics, genomics, and nanotechnology, among others), we observe something like a close encounter of the fourth kind: abduction by an alien force.24 Or, to put it another way: the scientific inhabitation of the narrative patterns and generic tropes of science fiction … no longer alien….